Chamber Music America Honors Chick Corea

New York, NY –- A distinguished figure on the American musical scene for over four decades, Chick Corea will be honored at Chamber Music America’s National Conference this January 14-17. Having explored musical styles ranging from avant-garde to fusion to classical, Corea will receive CMA’s highest honor—The Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award—and Chamber Music America will collaborate with New York’s Symphony Space to present a special tribute concert to Chick Corea on Saturday, January 16 at 8:00 PM. On Sunday, January 17, Corea will receive the honor at Chamber Music America’s annual Awards Banquet, where composer, educator, and parodist Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach) and composer/pianist Billy Childs will speak in tribute.

The Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award is given annually to an individual who has had a great impact on the field of chamber music over a significant period of time. Former recipients include Rudolph Serkin, Alice Tully, and Elliott Carter. In addition to receiving the award, Corea will be joined on Saturday afternoon by violinist/violist Ida Kavafian, pianist/composer Billy Childs, cellist Fred Sherry, and violist Phillip Ying in a discussion of a form that can bring classical and jazz together: the string quartet.

Chamber Music America’s 2010 National Conference, “Big Ideas for Presenting Small Ensembles,” is an exciting opportunity for young ensembles to network with seasoned professionals. The conference, held in New York City every year, is the largest annual gathering of chamber music professionals bringing together over 700 musicians, presenters, educators, managers, and music businesses from across the country. Notable speakers at this year’s conference include Chick Corea, Steve Reich and Leon Botstein.

Pianist Geoffrey Keezer, bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer Antonio Sanchez, as well as saxophonist Tim Garland, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and Corea's longtime duo partner, vibraphonist Gary Burton, among others, join forces on January 16 at 8:00 PM to pay tribute to Corea in a special concert. Watch for updates from Chamber Music America, as additional performers will be added. Tickets are currently on sale here.

Chick Corea is a towering figure in the world of jazz and beyond. A pianist, a keyboardist, a drummer and a composer, the range of Corea’s musical activity is encyclopedic. He has straddled the realms of acoustic and electric, improvised and notated jazz. In addition to collaborating with generations of music legends, he has maintained an allegiance to small-ensemble music. This is partly reflected in his own groups: Return to Forever, the Elektric and Akoustic Bands, Circle, Origin, and many others. It can also be seen in his landmark collaboration with vibraphonist Gary Burton. As a composer, he has created a body of notated work that has been taken up by classical chamber music groups as well as jazz ensembles.

Steve Reich was recently called "our greatest living composer" by The New York Times, "America’s greatest living composer” by The Village Voice, and “the most original musical thinker of our time” by The New Yorker. From his early taped speech pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his digital opera Three Tales (2002) with video
artist Beryl Korot, Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music.

President of Bard College Leon Botstein is also music director and principal conductor of the American and the Jerusalem symphony orchestras, and is co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival. A historian who received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1985, Botstein is the editor of The Musical Quarterly and the author of numerous articles and books, most recently Vienna: Jews and the City of Music, 1870–1938 (2004) and Music and Modernity (forthcoming from Yale University Press).